NYT Op-Ed Gets It Right: “Home Care Workers Aren’t Just ‘Companions’”

In case you (like many of us here at NWLC) have been too busy dealing with power outages and oppressive heat to keep up with the New York Times over the past few days, I wanted to flag for you a great op-ed from Sunday’s paper. In it, Professors Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein make a concise and compelling case for granting long overdue Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) protections – minimum wage and overtime premium pay – to home care workers.

You might recall that President Obama has also called for this policy change, and late last year, the Department of Labor (DOL) proposed a new rule that would extend FLSA protections to home care workers. Specifically, the proposed regulations would exclude these workers from the FLSA’s exemption for “companionship services.” To date, this exemption – which was intended to exempt casual caregivers, like babysitters, from FLSA requirements when the statute was expanded to cover domestic service workers in 1974 – has been inappropriately applied to the professional workers who provide the intensive care necessary for many elderly and ill adults to remain in their homes. As Boris and Klein observe, the home care workforce has exploded since the 1970s as the U.S. population has aged, and the “existing exemption mainly serves home-care franchises, an $84 billion industry that is one of the most profitable in the United States….[It] has allowed staffing agencies to avoid paying overtime [and] treated women who labored to support their families as if they were teenagers picking up some spending money.”

The National Women’s Law Center and many other women’s organizations have expressed strong support for DOL’s proposed regulations, which would finally provide minimum wage and overtime protections to a large and growing workforce that is about 90 percent female. About two-thirds of the 26,000 comments DOL received also supported the new rule. But DOL has yet to issue final regulations, and in the meantime, some Republicans in Congress have stepped up efforts to block any changes to existing policy. Most recently, Sen. Johanns (R-NE) (with 14 co-sponsors) introduced S. 3280, the “Companionship Exemption Protection Act,” which would permanently exclude home care workers from FLSA coverage by defining “companionship services” to include “meal preparation, bed making, washing of clothes, errands” and “assistance with incontinence and grooming.”

Attempts to continue denying an entire professional workforce the basic protections of the FLSA are insulting and unacceptable. Boris and Klein explain more eloquently than I can:

Establishing the legitimacy of care as productive, necessary labor – a real job – would recognize the realities of both our aging society and our service economy….This fight isn’t simply about the ability to earn the minimum wage or slightly more for working even longer hours; that would still keep home-care workers poor. [Ed. note : the minimum wage is too low for all workers – it’s time to raise it!] Its deeper possibility is the potential to re-establish some notion of labor standards, rights and security after decades of gutting them.

Home care workers should not have to wait any longer for the rights and respect they deserve. DOL must finalize and implement its regulations without delay.